A hyper-textual display of my technical and writing prowess, or lack of the same. You have been warned.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Upgrade to Spring

Yesterday in a fit of mind I decided to upgrade to Mandriva latest release. The steps included - backing up .kde, .kderc, .qt, .gtk* and .local- logging out of kde- setting up a mirror as a distribution source for urpmi (mandriva is offering non-free e.g. sun-java in its free source these days, but I still need the PLF sources for codecs, BCI enabled freetype and fontconfig and a few other things)- # urpmi urpmi- # urpmi <bunch of> kernels- # urpmi --auto-select and then selecting the ones I would like to upgrade from them

Soon I was running Mandriva 2007.1 Spring (Free). Yay! Its beautiful. The Ia_ora theme and other Mandriva artwork is gorgeous. I legally own a XP cd, from which I extensively use Verdana (for text) and Tahoma (for widgets). They look wonderful as always with plf freetype (w/ hinting). I like to use large fonts, enough to be readable 4 ft afar but somehow the deja or bitstream fonts have a weird fuzziness in the curves of 's' and 'o's. I cleared the settings of a test user account and a default new account looks quite good (apart from the kbfx-styled mandriva menu).

KDE was upgraded to 3.5.6; I was actually using a few kde-3.5.6 packages from cooker so there was no huge surprise. I was worried that mandriva would mess up some of my settings when I log in for the first time as my normal user but thankfully that did not happen. The system feels faster, konsole definitely starts faster than before. Overall, I am extremely pleased with 2007.1; I wish them all the best.http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2007.1/Tour

Some minor annoyances:- mandriva kernel (based on 2.6.17) still has the weird cpufreq bug where scaling_max_freq is same as scaling_min_freq (thus rendering all the governors useless). It is probably the same problem described in

http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-acpi@vger.kernel.org/msg04484.html- Suspend to RAM is broken in mm kernel (Mandriva has moved to pm-utils and it works like a charm w/ the default kernel)- tmb kernel has some problems of high CPU usage when copying files and broken resume from s2ram. I still need to test the other tmb versions. I really like the tmb kernel improvements.